2015, Suffolk and Watt edition, with notes by Dr. Robert Brown, 297 pages
I am familiar with Thomas Pellow and his decades’ long ordeal from reading the book focused on his life, titled White Gold, a gift from S.S. Sam, buried in the “read pile” just now. Mescaline Franklin has leant me Pellow’s own account in this nicely annotated reprint. For a book written almost 300 years ago I find Pellow’s version of Middle English pleasing and easily readable. As for his experiences, the following items stand out starkly:
-Pellow’s own uncle, under whom he shipped as a seaman to learn the mariner’s trade at age 11, beat him every day with a cat-o’-nine-tails, a weapon of discipline that killed tens of thousands of men over the centuries of its use. This is a level of brutality that American slavery apologists generally deny was applied to whites and blacks by plantation masters of the same time and nation, being Britain. It is a fact that the treatment of a loyal sailor, soldier or son, in 18th century Britain, was worse than what most modern people will believe occurred in slave pens. Those that do believe that this level of cruelty was common will only believe that it was white on black, motivated by racial hatred and ideals of white supremacy.
-While Pellow and other Europeans of various nationalities slaved and died in bondage, they regularly encountered free European merchants, who were permitted to range the country on their business and even do kindnesses for their countrymen and fellow Europeans in bondage. It is obvious that slavery was a fact of daily life not just in Morocco, but in Europe and America.
-Slavery in Morocco seems to have been more horrible than other places in North Africa and apparently worse than in North America. The level of lethal cruelty seems to have been on par with the treatment of slaves and servants in French San Domingo [Haiti], Spanish Cuba, and English Barbados and Jamaica.
-As with the transatlantic slave trade, Jewish middle men were important providers of credit and agents of exchange. The poor, rural Moroccan Jews were also the source of many kindnesses to the white slaves and also of their wine. Alcohol was such an important aspect of keeping Europeans happy that the Sultan made sure it, or the means of making it, were available. Jews—even the wealthiest—were liable to be cruelly murdered out of hand by the Sultan on a whim.
-While serving in the white slave army as converted “Muslims” the European soldiers were permitted to drink alcohol and to hunt and eat pork when away from the general Muslim population.
-The Berber Sultans of Morocco imported so many blacks as slave drivers and slave soldiers that these blacks formed their own formidable political block, against which the white slave soldiers were used as a counterbalance.
-Slaves were divided into the following categories:
1. Sex slaves, preferably white women, also white boys and castrated white men to be sold to the Turks.
2. Slave laborers, preferably white men
3. Black slave soldiers, forming the bulk of the army.
4. White slave soldiers, forming special military units.
5. Black slave drivers, jailers, torturers and executioners, including squads of men specializing in upending a man and dropping him on his head to kill him.
6. White slave advisors and highly valued specialists, such as Absalom, an English butcher from Exeter who served as the headsman, slashing off two heads at a time.
7. The heavily-wooded and well-watered uplands of the Atlas Mountains were home to huge boars, leopards [who stalked men by the roadside], lions, who laid in the middle of the road and dared men to pass, teeming jackals and wild mountain tribesmen, with Thomas’s adventures as a battalion commander in the Atlas Mountains marking the high point of his tale.
Early modern Morocco was a place of un-paralleled tyranny and cruelty, the slaves so worked, beaten and murdered out of hand that they required constant replacement, with Europeans regularly captured at sea and in coastal raids [whole villages being carried off in 1600s England] and blacks captured in equatorial Africa and walked across the western arm of the Sahara by slave-catching armies that suffered greatly in the process. Part of this anti-European resolve, so marked in Morocco compared to Tunis and Algiers, was definitely a result of the Spanish Reconquista and expulsion of the Moors and Jews [largely] to Morocco circa 1500.
America in Chains
Offtopic:
Do you have any acquaintance with the work of John Taylor Gatto?
His book, the Underground History of American Education, changed my life about 15 years ago.
I just came across this series of interviews with him: youtu.be/YQiW_l848t8
He discusses slavery and "emancipation" a bit in the first one. I'm going through the rest right now. Thought you would enjoy them.
Thanks, Bro,
I have not read him, but will.
James
If you want to read a well-written book on Morocco from 1750-1900, I recommend Porch's THE CONQUEST OF MOROCCO. Morocco was so fucked up, it's hard to blame the French for conquering it. Morocco in the 1800s made Mexico in the same period look almost like Switzerland. Seeds of the Muslim conquest a 1000yrs before coming to full bloom. An Arab(ish) overclass importing a black underclass and the halfway decent Berbers (who'd been there for 7000+yrs) getting squeezed in the middle.
BTW, 18th century English is just early Modern English. Read Chaucer if you want Middle English. I find I can read 17th century educated English easier than I can some of the verbal vomit spewed by many subliterates today.
Thanks for the heads up, Deuce—what a wicked wonderland this place was.